Reading “chunked” POST data in PHP

Question

I'm trying to read the POST data from a request with "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" while it's being sent but can't get the script to fire until after all of the data has been received, is it possible to get PHP to be able to react to a chunked request as it's coming through?

Using PHP 5.3.8 with Apache.

Answer 1

The current Apache API does not provide the ability to invoke a response handler before the request has been completely received. It is not possible for any module (mod_php, mod_cgi et al) to start processing and respond to the request until the handler phase, and he Apache core does not reach this phase until after the request has been completely received and preliminary processing/parsing checks have completed.

It is unusual to send a chunked stream as a request, normally something like this is a response. HTTP is a protocol designed primarily for one-to-many content delivery - an HTTP server is expecting to server content to many clients, rather than to have many clients deliver content to it. Normally to achieve this you would invoke a script on the server that will connect to the remote stream (be the requester).

What exactly are you trying to do? What content are you trying to deliver? Do you have control over both ends of the connection?